Dismay, disappointment and surprise have swirled through my heart and mind these past months as we have heard so often of ‘racially focussed’ vandalism. I use that term ‘racial’ cautiously; it is not normally part of my vocabulary, writes Congregational Leader Sister Catherine McCahill.

We Australians like to think of ourselves as easy-going, fair-minded, accepting of newcomers. We have a long history of new arrivals to this land. It has not always been easy but in my lifetime, I have not previously seen what has happened repeatedly in recent months.

The first people who arrived here about 60,000 years ago developed rituals and customs for living as groups or nations. No doubt there was conflict at times, but there is not much evidence of repeated inter-group violence.

In the last millennia, possibly for hundreds of years, traders and other visitors arrived and left. I have not seen evidence of violence. This changed with the establishment of a British colony in 1788. The massacres, disenfranchisement and dislocation of the Indigenous people is beyond description. Here, I want to acknowledge that and salute our Indigenous people who not only survived, but in various ways are thriving and passing on the culture, language, stories and traditions to this generation.

Since the arrival of the first convict ships, wave after wave of migrants have found their home on this continent. Some were sent, but most came freely and for many reasons. They came for religious freedom, for the chance to own their own piece of land, for economic security, for gold, to escape persecution, poverty, the ravages of war or because there was nowhere else to go.

They came by their own resources, and they came supported by the colonial or Australian governments. They came on penal ships, passenger and cargo ships, they came by plane, and they came in vessels not meant for the open seas.  

Over the years, each generation has seen new waves of migrants. The experiences have been mixed. Some have found immediate welcome and thrived. Others have faced discrimination and hardship as they struggled to make a home in this strange new country. Most have stayed and I hope that most have found peace and safety.

As a nation, we have all benefitted. I hesitate to say “all”, aware that some of our Indigenous people would not agree. I leave that judgement to them.

Many of us have learnt to appreciate or at least acknowledge without prejudice each other’s culture, traditions, food and family practices. We live side by side, we go to school together, we marry across ethnicity and religious practice. Overall, and on most days, we do it well.

I am not naïve; I know that it has not been easy for many and is still not easy for some. However, in my lifetime I have seen and experienced so much goodwill in the community and at all levels of public life to improve our sociability, our way of being with each other so that we all thrive.

Then it changed. As reported in The Guardian newspaper last month, ’Acts of hate are on the rise in Australia’.

Antisemitic and Islamophobic attacks have been reported all too frequently since 7 October 2023. The brutal attack by Hamas in southern Israel and the brutality of the retaliation by the Israeli government in Gaza opened deep, intergenerational wounds and the suffering on both sides continues.

I am saddened at the extent of recent ’hate attacks’ in this country. Slogans and derogatory symbols painted on public buildings, vandalism of the offices of parliamentary members, and the torching of cars and buildings that is targeted at a particular part of the community is intolerable. The destruction of an early childhood centre simply because it was near a religious building left me speechless.

This is all un-Australian. It is equally un-Australian when politicians from any party intimate that somehow or other the behaviour, words or lack of words from the ’other’ side is fuelling this behaviour.

We can be bigger and better than this. The situation in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel is appalling from whichever lens or perspective that we view it. However, acts of ’hatred’ perpetrated in our community on behalf of one group or another are also appalling.

Muslims had contact with Australia’s Indigenous people as early as the seventeenth century. The Macassans, from what is now known as eastern Indonesia, fished off the coast of northern Australia. Cave drawings of the local Indigenous people depict their boats and artefacts. Some anthropologists suggest that marriages occurred.

The manifestoes of transportees to the penal colony include Islamic names. By the mid-nineteenth century Muslim Malays were diving for pearls in northern and western Australia and Muslim Afghan cameleers were employed by explorers, pastoralists and merchants, especially in the continent’s dry interior. 

Larger groups of Muslim people arrived from Turkey and then Middle Eastern countries from the 1970s.

Jewish people arrived in Australia on the penal ships in 1788. This country opened its home and heart to a new wave of Jewish migrants after the atrocities in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mosques and synagogues have been part of the Australian religious landscape for generations.

All people who have arrived on these shores over the countless millennia came seeking a life for themselves and their families. They have worked together to build a nation of which we can be proud. There have been isolated, violent episodes of hate and prejudice, but few in my lifetime.

I wonder, have we forgotten our way? Have we forgotten that we all came from somewhere else, and we need to be neighbours to each other for the good of all.

Our traditions and religious teaching invite us to more than this:

From the Quran: “And the servants of the Most Merciful are those who walk upon the earth easily, and when the ignorant address them (harshly), they say (words of) peace.” (Surah Al-Furqan, 25:63)

From the Hebrew Scriptures: “Seek peace and pursue it.” (Psalm 34:14)